by Nevil Shute
He grew weaker and weaker, and two days later he died in the night. There seemed no particular reason why he should have died, but the disgrace of Kuantan was heavy on him and he seemed to have lost interest and the will to live. They buried him that day in the Moslem cemetery outside the village, and most of them wept a little for him as an old and valued friend.
The death of the sergeant left them in a most unusual position, for they were now prisoners without a guard. They discussed it at some length that evening after the funeral. ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t stay here, where we are,’ said Mrs Frith. ‘It’s a nice place, this is, as nice as any that we’ve come to. That’s what He said, we ought to find a place where we’d be out of the way, and just live there.’
Jean said, ‘I know. There’s two things we’d have to settle though. First, the Japs are bound to find out sometime that we’re living here, and then the headman will get into trouble for having allowed us to stay here without telling them. They’d probably kill him. You know what they are.’
‘Maybe they wouldn’t find us, after all,’ said Mrs Price.
‘I don’t believe Mat Amin is the man to take that risk,’ Jean said. ‘There isn’t any reason why he should. If we stay he’ll go straight to the Japanese and tell them that we’re here.’ She paused. ‘The other thing is that we can’t expect this village to go on feeding seventeen of us for ever just because we’re white mems. They’ll go and tell the Japs about us just to get rid of us.’
Mrs Frith said shrewdly, ‘We could grow our own food, perhaps. Half the paddy fields we walked by coming in haven’t been planted this year.’
Jean stared at her. ‘That’s quite right – they haven’t. I wonder why that is?’
‘All the men must have gone to the war,’ said Mrs Warner. ‘Working as coolies taking up that railway line, or something of that.’
Jean said slowly, ‘What would you think of this? Suppose I go and tell Mat Amin that we’ll work in the rice fields if he’ll let us stay here? What would you think of that?’
Mrs Price laughed. ‘Me, with my figure? Walking about in mud and water up to the knee planting them little seedlings in the mud, like you see the Malay girls doing?’
Jean said apologetically, ‘It was just a thought.’
‘And a very good one, too,’ said Mrs Warner. ‘I wouldn’t mind working in the paddy fields if we could stay here and live comfortable and settled.’
Mrs Frith said, ‘If we were growing rice like that, maybe they’d let us stay here – the Japs I mean. After all, in that way we’d be doing something useful, instead of walking all over the country like a lot of whipped dogs with no home.’
Next morning Jean went to the headman. She put her hands together in the praying gesture of greeting, and smiled at him and said in Malay, ‘Mat Amin, why do we see the paddy fields not sown this year? We saw so many of them as we came to this place, not sown at all.’
He said, ‘Most of the men, except the fishermen, are working for the army.’ He meant the Japanese Army.
‘On the railway?’
‘No. They are at Gong Kedak. They are making a long piece of land flat, and making roads, and covering the land they have made flat with tar and stones, so that aeroplanes can come down there.’
‘Are they coming back soon to plant paddy?’
‘It is in the hand of God, but I do not think they will come back for many months. I have heard that after they have done this thing at Gong Kedak, there is another such place to be made at Machang, and another at Tan Yongmat. Once a man falls into the power of the Japanese it is not easy for him to escape and come back to his home.’
‘Who, then, will plant the paddy, and reap it?’
‘The women will do what they can. Rice will be short next year, not here, because we shall not sell the paddy that we need to eat ourselves. We shall not have enough to sell to the Japanese. I do not know what they are going to eat, but it will not be rice.’
Jean said, ‘Mat Amin, I have serious matters to discuss with you. If there were a man amongst us I would send him to talk for us, but there is no man. You will not be offended if I ask you to talk business with a woman, on behalf of women?’ She now knew something of the right approach to a Mohammedan.
He bowed to her, and led her to his house. There was a small rickety veranda; they went up to this and sat down upon the floor facing each other. He was a level-eyed old man with close-cropped hair and a small, clipped moustache, naked to the waist and wearing a sarong; his face was firm, but not unkind. He called sharply to his wife within the house to bring out coffee.
Jean waited till the coffee appeared, making small talk for politeness; she knew the form after six months in the villages. It came in two thick glasses, without milk and sweet with sugar. She bowed to him, and lifted her glass and sipped, and set it down again. ‘We are in a difficulty,’ she said frankly. ‘Our guard is dead, and what now will become of us is in our own hands – and in yours. You know our story. We were taken prisoner at Panong, and since then we have walked many hundreds of miles to this place. No Japanese commander will receive us and put us in a camp and feed us and attend to us in illness, because each commander thinks that these things are the duty of the other; so they march us under guard from town to town. This has been going on now for more than six months, and in that time half of our party have died upon the road.’ He inclined his head.
‘Now that our gunso is dead,’ she said, ‘what shall we do? If we go on until we find a Japanese officer and report to him, he will not want us; nobody in all this country wants us. They will not kill us quickly, as they might if we were men. They will get us out of the way by marching us on to some other place, perhaps into a country of swamps such as we have come through. So we shall grow ill again, and one by one we shall all die. That is what lies ahead of us, if we report now to the Japanese.’
He replied, ‘It is written that the angels said, “Every soul shall taste of death, and we will prove you with evil and with good for a trial of you, and unto us shall ye return.”’
She thought quickly; the words of the headman at Dilit came into her mind. She said, ‘It is also written, “If ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.”’
He eyed her steadily. ‘Where is that written?’
She said, ‘In the Fourth Surah.’
‘Are you of the Faith?’ he asked incredulously.
She shook her head. ‘I do not want to deceive you. I am a Christian; we are all Christians. The headman of a village on our road was kind to us, and when I thanked him he said that to me. I do not know the Koran.’
‘You are a very clever woman,’ he said. ‘Tell me what you want.’
‘I want our party to stay here, in this village,’ she said, ‘and go to work in the paddy fields, as your women do.’ He stared at her, astonished. ‘This will be dangerous for you,’ she said. ‘We know that very well. If Japanese officers find us in this place before you have reported to them that we are here, they will be very angry. And so, I want you to do this. I want you to let us go to work at once with one or two of your women to show us what to do. We will work all day for our food alone and a place to sleep. When we have worked so for two weeks, I will go myself and find an officer and report to him, and tell him what we are doing. And you shall come with me, as headman of this village, and you shall tell the officer that more rice will be grown for the Japanese if we are allowed to continue working in the rice fields. These are the things I want.’
‘I have never heard of white mems working in the paddy fields,’ he said.
She asked, ‘Have you ever heard of white mems marching and dying as we have marched and died?’
He was silent.
‘We are in your hands,’ she said. ‘If you say, go upon your way and walk on to some other place, then we must go, and going we must die. That will then be a matter between you and God. If you allow us to stay and cultivate your fields and live with you
in peace and safety, you will get great honour when the English Tuans return to this country after their victory. Because they will win this war in the end; these Short Ones are in power now, but they cannot win against the Americans and all the free peoples of the world. One day the English Tuans will come back.’
He said, ‘I shall be glad to see that day.’
They sat in silence for a time, sipping the glasses of coffee. Presently the headman said, ‘This is a matter not to be decided lightly, for it concerns the whole village. I will think about it and I will talk it over with my brothers.’
Jean went away, and that evening after the hour of evening prayer she saw a gathering of men squatting with the headman in front of his house; they were all old men, because there were very few young ones in Kuala Telang at that time, and young ones probably would not have been admitted to the conference in any case. Later that evening Mat Amin came to the godown and asked for Mem Paget; Jean came out to him, carrying the baby. She stood talking to him in the light of a small oil lamp.
‘We have discussed this matter that we talked about,’ he said. ‘It is a strange thing, that white mems should work in our rice fields, and some of my brothers are afraid that the white Tuans will not understand when they come back, and that they will be angry, saying we have made you work for us against your will.’
Jean said, ‘We will give you a letter now, that you can show them if they should say that.’
He shook his head. ‘It is not necessary. It is sufficient if you tell the Tuans when they come back that this thing was done because you wished it so.’
She said, ‘That we will do.’
They went to work next day. There were six married women in the party at that time, and Jean, and ten children including Jean’s baby. The headman took them out to the fields with two Malay girls, Fatimah binti Darus and Raihana binti Hassan. He gave them seven small fields covered in weeds to start upon, an area that was easily within their power to manage. There was a roofed platform nearby in the fields for resting in the shade; they left the youngest children here and went to work.
The seven women were all fairly robust; the journey had eliminated the ones who would have been unable to stand agricultural work. Those who were left were women of determination and grit, with high morale and a good sense of humour. As soon as they became accustomed to the novelty of working ankle-deep in mud and water they did not find the work exacting, and presently as they became accustomed to it they were seized with an ambition to show the village that white mems could do as much work as Malay women, or more.
Paddy is grown in little fields surrounded by a low wall of earth, so that water from a stream can be led into the field at will to turn it into a shallow pool. When the water is let out again the earth bottom is soft mud, and weeds can be pulled out by hand and the ground hoed and prepared for the seedlings. The seedlings are raised by scattering the rice in a similar nursery field, and they are then transplanted in rows into the muddy field. The field is then flooded again for a few days while the seedlings stand with their heads above the water in the hot sun, and the water is let out again for a few days to let the sun get to the roots. With alternating flood and dry in that hot climate the plants grow very quickly to about the height of wheat, with feathery ears of rice on top of the stalks. The rice is harvested by cutting off the ears with a little knife, leaving the straw standing, and is taken in sacks to the village to be winnowed. Water buffaloes are then turned in to eat the straw and fertilize the ground and tramp it all about, and the ground is ready for sowing again to repeat the cycle. Two crops a year are normally got from the rice fields, and there is no rotation of crop.
Working in these fields is not unpleasant when you get accustomed to it. There are worse things to do in a very hot country than to put on a large conical sun-hat of plaited palm leaves and take off most of your clothes, and play about with mud and water, damming and diverting little trickling streams. By the end of the fortnight the women had settled down to it and quite liked the work, and all the children loved it from the first. No Japanese came near the village in that time.
On the sixteenth day Jean started out with the headman, Mat Amin, to go and look for the Japanese; they carried the sergeant’s rifle and equipment, and his uniform, and his paybook. There was a place called Kuala Rakit twenty-seven miles away where a Japanese detachment was stationed, and they went there.
They took two days to walk this distance, staying overnight at a place called Bukit Perah. They stayed with the headman there, Jean sleeping in the back quarters with the women. They went on next day and came to Kuala Rakit in the evening; it was a very large village, or small town. Here Mat Amin took her to see an official of the Malay administration at his house, Tungku Bentara Raja. Tungku Bentara was a little thin Malay who spoke excellent English; he was genuinely concerned at the story that he heard from Mat Amin and from Jean.
‘I am very, very sorry,’ he said at last. ‘I cannot do much to help you directly, because the Japanese control everything we do. It is terrible that you should have to work in the rice fields.’
‘That’s not terrible at all,’ Jean said. ‘As a matter of fact, we rather like it. We want to stay there, with Mat Amin here. If the Japanese have got a camp for women in this district I suppose they’ll put us into that, but if they haven’t, we don’t want to go on marching all over Malaya. Half of us have died already doing that.’
‘You must stay with us tonight,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow I will have a talk with the Japanese Civil Administrator. There is no camp here for women, anyway.’
That night Jean slept in a bed for the first time in nearly seven months. She did not care for it much; having grown used to sleeping on the floor she found it cooler to sleep so than to sleep on a mattress. She did not actually get out of bed and sleep upon the floor, but she came very near to it. The bath and shower after the bath taken by holding a gourd full of water over her head, however, were a joy, and she spent a long time washing.
In the morning she went with Tungku Bentara and Mat Amin to the Japanese Civil Administrator, and told her tale again. The Civil Administrator had been to the State University of California and spoke first-class American English; he was sympathetic, but declared that prisoners were nothing to do with him, being the concern of the Army. He came with them, however, to see the military commanding officer, a Colonel Matisaka, and Jean told her tale once more.
It was quite clear that Colonel Matisaka considered women prisoners to be a nuisance, and he had no intention whatsoever of diverting any portion of his force to guarding them. Left to himself he would probably have sent them marching on, but with Tungku Bentara and the Civil Administrator in his office and acquainted with the facts he could hardly do that. In the end he washed his hands of the whole thing and told the Civil Administrator to make what arrangements he thought best. The Civil Administrator told Bentara that the women could stay where they were for the time being, and Jean started back for Kuala Telang with Mat Amin.
They lived there for three years.
‘It was three years wasted, just chopped out of one’s life,’ she said. She raised her head and looked at me, hesitantly. ‘At least – I suppose it was. I know a lot about Malays, but that’s not worth much here in England.’
‘You won’t know if it was wasted until you come to the end of your life,’ I said. ‘Perhaps not then.’
She nodded. ‘I suppose that’s right.’ She took up the poker and began scraping the ash from the bars of the grate. ‘They were so very kind to us,’ she said. ‘They couldn’t have been nicer, within the limits of what they are and what they’ve got. Fatimah, the girl who showed us what to do in the rice fields in those first weeks – she was a perfect dear. I got to know her very well indeed.’
‘Is that where you want to go back to?’ I asked.
She nodded. ’I would like to do something for them, now that I’ve got this money. We lived with them for three years, and they did everything for us. We’
d have all died before the war was ended if they hadn’t taken us in and let us stay with them. And now I’ve got so much, and they so very, very little ‘Don’t forget you haven’t got as much as all that,’ ‘I said. Travelling to Malaya is a very expensive journey.’
She smiled. ‘I know. What I want to do for them won’t cost so very much – not more than fifty pounds, if that. We had to carry water in that village – that’s the women’s work – and it’s a fearful job. You see, the river’s tidal at the village so the water’s brackish; you can use it for washing in or rinsing out your clothes, but drinking water has to be fetched from the spring, nearly a mile away. We used to go for it with gourds, two in each hand with a stick between them, morning and evening – a mile there and a mile back – four miles a day. Fatimah and the other girls didn’t think about it; it’s what the village has done always, generation after generation.’
‘That’s why you want to dig a well?’
She nodded. ‘It’s something I could do for them, for the women – something that would make life easier for them, as they made life easier for us. A well right in the middle of the village, within a couple of hundred yards of every house. It’s what they ought to have. I’m sure it wouldn’t have to be more than about ten feet deep, because there’s water all about. The water level can’t be more than about ten feet down, or fifteen feet at the most. I thought if I went back there and offered to engage a gang of well-diggers to do this for them, it’ld sort of wind things up. And after that I could enjoy this money with a clear conscience.’ She looked up at me again. ‘You don’t think that’s silly, do you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think that. The only thing is, I wish it wasn’t quite so far away. Travelling there and back will make a very big hole in a year’s income.’
‘I know that,’ she said. ‘If I run out of money, I’ll take a job in Singapore or somewhere for a few months and save up a bit.’
